


The Nothing that Happened (or 87 tins of Bioluminescent Lentils)

by Clipped_Ionian_Vowels



Series: Enemies with Benefits [1]
Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Enemies With Benefits, Enemies to Lovers, First Time, Light Angst, M/M, S01E03, Series 1, as far as I'm aware, no spoilers for anything after s01e03, s01e03 Balance of Power, softlight!Rimmer, this idea would not leave me the smeg alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 22:24:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17374361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clipped_Ionian_Vowels/pseuds/Clipped_Ionian_Vowels
Summary: There's rather more to softlight than meets the eye. Our two young and intrepid space idiots decide to explore it, get a little carried away and discover something that neither of them had bargained for.It is something that they are not supposed to attach significance to.





	The Nothing that Happened (or 87 tins of Bioluminescent Lentils)

**Author's Note:**

> Another day, another RD fic.  
> This idea would not leave me alone and has been hanging around ever since I watched Balance of Power for the first time (I was exactly three episodes into RD and already gripping the caboose of the slash train, so there's no hope for me really).  
> No spoilers for anything after s01e03 Balance of Power.

Rimmer was in the darkest corner of the store, sitting on a box of tinned lentils and desperately trying to convince himself that what had just happened had been an entire non-event, a damp squib of an incident, a non-calendar occasion. A re-sent red-letter day.

Of course, the culprit and person to blame for all this thinking had been none other than Mr Smegger-Upper Extraordinaire and General Pain in the Backside, Dave Lister. _Of course_ it had been him. Who else? It was him, after all, that started this whole business, walking _through_ Rimmer, like he was some sort of trashy holographic bead curtain hanging across the driveroom door.

Rimmer sunk his head into his hands, staring at the box label between his knees. The times where Lister made a point to walk through him were some of the worst times, for the reason that afterwards he was left breathless and discombobulated and trying to figure out what he had felt for that brief millisecond of time.

His eyes were tired and grey and misty with reminiscence. Now he _knew._ Now he knew exactly what it was that he felt in that brief millisecond. Being a hologram, for all its flaws, had given him something unexpected. Something that he was not about to forget anytime soon. It had given him the Nothing that happened, and all that that entailed.

His mind pitched him backwards, constantly rewinding, reliving the memory for what seemed like the hundredth time, remembering everything in such achingly precise detail that he wondered whether the dust from Lister’s illegal memory drugs had slipped into his projection unit.

\----

“You can’t do this to me Lister,”

“Give me Kochanski,” Lister’s comment was flippant and Rimmer was sick with it. Sick with the fact that his bunkmate was a first rate idiot who wanted to spend time with a woman he barely even knew. Exhausted with the fact that there was a very real chance that Lister cared so little about him that he would never turn him back on. Not for all the curry in India.

“No,” Rimmer pretended that it wasn’t a sort of rabid jealousy that controlled his answer and stopped him agreeing to Lister’s unreasonable demands.

Lister smiled nastily and proceeded to walk through him and out the door.

“That was a lousy thing to do to a hologram,” Rimmer fumed, “Have you no respect for the dead?”

The other man ignored him, swaggering down the corridor with a hip sway that even the Cat would be proud of.

Despite his sharp words, Rimmer’s projection betrayed him, making him giddy as an entire body shiver rushed through him in the aftermath of Lister’s touch. He let out a confused sigh and Lister paused halfway down the corridor, shook his head in dismissal of _something_ and sauntered onwards, intent on making his way to his smegging awful chef’s exam.

It was at that point that Rimmer really _really_ wished that he hadn’t had the bright idea of masquerading as Kochanski.

It was a piss-poor job really. But he had been desperate and was having an alright go at it until he smegged up and said; “I could never love _anyone_ like you, so you might as well pack up your pots and pans and off you go.  I need a man who's going places!  Up, up, up the ziggurat, lickety-split,” and Lister had called his bluff.

Rimmer’s original plan had been to seduce Lister, entice him out of the room with promises of an evening together, let the chef’s exam run and force Lister to fail by disqualification. But jealousy had reared its ugly head, making Rimmer want to spit vitriol out of Kochanski’s mouth, make it so that Lister hated her and wanted nothing more to do with her. It had been impulsive and stupid, much like the Cat’s decision to order six fish and consume them all within the space of ten minutes.

But really, everything would have been fine if Lister had just gone along with it and pretended that he _wouldn’t_ sit the stupid chef’s exam, because then Rimmer wouldn’t have had to try to convince him that he really was Kochanski and then Lister wouldn’t have tried to kiss him and then Rimmer wouldn’t have let him.

But Rimmer had let him. Not that there was much there to kiss. Not that it had even been allowed to get so far as to be called a _kiss,_ not really. It was more a sort of facsimile approximation of one, meant to unsettle Rimmer and nothing more, but when Lister’s hand slipped around his back and pressed _through_ him Rimmer felt a full body shudder ripple his skin, only intensifying when Lister didn’t pull away, staring at him uncomprehendingly. The dreadful kissy face that he’d been making only seconds before had now been replaced with something dumbfounded and strangely awestruck. Rimmer was sure that his expression must have been identical.

He’d read the manuals about holograms of course. Well. All three pages of the introduction of volume one. But it was enough to get the important bits.

_Being dead. It’s a bit of a bummer! But with this handy manual, we tell you all the tips and tricks to keeping your chin up when your physical form is six-feet under!_

Rimmer had been instantly put off by the narrator’s chirpy tone and the rather gauche ‘free-gift’ that was included (a bumper sticker with “Honk if you’re a Holo!” spelt across it in lurid pink script).

_From navigating the complicated twists and turns of Life after Death to exciting new tricks you can perform to amuse your friends, we help by answering all those questions that party guests just won’t stop asking you._

_This manual starts with a history of the hologram, a comment from its creator and our dos and don’ts for the newly deceased. There’s also a handy insert on How to Stop Living Folks Walking through You and Why They Shouldn’t, with an addendum for rare exceptions and excuses._

Rimmer was starting to suspect that he should have pushed through and read more of the book, but it had never been a particularly pressing issue before. He’d certainly never stopped to wonder why it was so frowned upon until Lister’s hand had gone through the centre of his back and stayed there, both of them looking at each other in shock as a thrumming roar of harmonic intensity rushed through them.

It was like nothing either of them had ever experienced. The best way that Rimmer could describe it was that it as if their very molecules became mixed, connecting them together in a way that he’d never felt connected to anybody. And with that connection came a strength of feeling so deep that he almost couldn’t breathe with it, with the unexpected feeling of vulnerable security, even as ripples of more familiar pleasure coursed southward.

Lister slowly withdrew his hand, darting nervous looks at Rimmer’s face as they both assessed the situation.

“Did you-” Lister asked, casting around for the correct words to illustrate the situation.

“Yes.” Rimmer nodded hastily, fully intending to deny it but instantly forgetting to as the affirmation tumbled from his lips.

“Could I-” Lister gestured at his body again and Rimmer nodded mutely, closing his eyes as Lister’s hand passed through him again. It was over too quickly – Lister’s hand snapped back to his side in an instant.

“It is you Rimmer, isn’t it?”

Rimmer opened his eyes, confused for a moment before realising that he was still wearing a Kochanski bodysuit.

“If I say ‘yes’, will you keep -” Rimmer’s words failed him and he just stared at the hand that Lister had been using to experiment.

“Yeah, if you’re… it that’s ok with you.” They were both hedging around the issue. Playing hot potato with a live grenade.

Rimmer called for Holly in a hoarse voice, asking for his old body. He was surprised to find that a small part of him missed having the curves, the petite frame. It wasn’t something that he could wear all the time, but it had felt almost nice to inhabit for a bit.

As his own body shimmered back, sans breasts, Lister took a breath and looked at him.

“I think we should go to the bunkroom for this,” he said quietly. His voice didn’t dip with suggestion, but Rimmer couldn’t help the way that his brain immediately leapt to that conclusion. He scolded it thoroughly, reasoning that the bunkroom was the most suitable location to investigate this. Lockable doors, away from Kryten and the Cat… he had a task reigning his mind back from the path that it was inevitably wandering down. With a man like Lister, a trip to the bunkroom was as likely to incur a midday nap as anything else. Besides, there was the very real possibility that this _thing_ might be dangerous, to one or both of them.

The thought should have alarmed Rimmer more than it did. Theoretically, it could do anything. Corrupt his disk. Turn Lister into a gibbering idiot (not that he wasn’t well on his way to that anyway). Fuse them together into some sort of horrific eldritch being with eight limbs and two heads and no escape. And frankly, an eternity attached to Lister didn’t bear thinking about.

Not to mention the fact that Rimmer was naturally suspicious of anything ‘good’ that happened to him. It usually turned out to be something that wanted to eat his brains or sleep in the bunk above and throw insults at him at every opportunity, all while challenging his fragile sense of self-esteem.

That settled it. This had been a terrible idea from the start and he should call it off before it got out of hand; he’d already let it go on long enough.

He was about to loudly proclaim that he was going downstairs to finish inventory and didn’t want to be disturbed for the next twelve hours, was that understood, _Miladdo?,_ when a sudden thought halted him dead in his tracks. He stood, mid corridor, staring after Lister in suspicious disbelief. _What about the chef's exam?_

“You alright man?”

“Oh yes,” Rimmer caught up to him, “Fine,”

“You sure?”

“ _Yes,_ keep walking,”

Rimmer started to power-walk down the corridor, stiff limbs falling into a militant march as Lister had to nearly jog to keep up.

“Slow down a sec Rimmer; I’ve only got little legs,”

“That’s not my fault,” but Rimmer slowed his pace all the same, letting Lister catch up to him.

“I do know what you’re doing,” Lister said quietly, a grin on his face.

“Do you?” Rimmer wasn’t quite sure himself. This all seemed to be going completely against his core principle of ‘When the going gets tough, run’.

“The chef’s exam? I’m not thick,”

Rimmer looked at him in disbelief.

“Not that thick, anyway,” Lister conceded.

“The _audacity,_ the very _suggestion_ that _I,_ Arnold J. Rimmer, would intentionally _sabotage_ -“

“I left because my petite fours were petite fives and didn’t taste good in the curry sauce,”

“You what?”

“I mean, I can always retake it. Just in case you were thinking of pulling any smegginess about your rank again,”

“But I don’t understand – why would you leave? You thrive on making my death a living hell!”

There was a pause.

“I don’t actually hate you, you know?”

Rimmer lapsed into a stunned silence. That was unexpected.

“At least, not all the time. Sometimes, when you’re not around, I think ‘Now Rimmer, Rimmer is a smegged up ball of walking neuroses with more hang-ups than a rejection hotline, more issues than Classic Car monthly, but great if you need to get through a locked door,”

Scratch that, this was completely expected.

Landmark piles of crinkled piping showed that they were nearing the bunkroom. Rimmer knew he was stuck in this course of action now. Maybe it really would be best to get this all over and done with before it could ruin his life any further.

Perhaps it had already irredeemably ruined his life.

Lister led the way through the sliding doors that steamed open with a hiss, asked for lights, and then asked for the door to be locked.

Rimmer’s ears pricked at the last phrase, but he tried not to read anything into it.

“Did you know about this?” Lister finally asked, swinging one of the dining table chairs round and sitting on it backwards. He didn’t stipulate what ‘this’ was, but it was painfully obvious. They’d avoided it on the walk down, escorting the elephant in the room down the corridors and trying not to step on its toes. But now it was too large for the room it was in and demanded acknowledgement.

Rimmer shook his head mutely. He didn’t feel able to answer. It felt like a filthy, shameful secret that he hadn’t even realised was in his possession, like finding Edition 69 of Big Boys in Boots magazine hidden under his pillow. Like a picture floating in the development solution of his psyche, safe, until someone unexpectedly opened the door and light poured over it. Only time would tell if the exposure would irreparably ruin the quality of the photo.

“You really didn’t know?”

“No! Don’t be dense!”

“How does it feel?” Lister asked, and Rimmer clammed up immediately, crossing his arms tightly against his chest.

“How does it feel for you?” he fired back, daring Lister to answer first.

“Like… like nothing else.” Lister shrugged in embarrassment, picking at a splinter on the chair, “It felt good. Really good. Like, like a really deep connection? Sorry, I’m getting sappy now. But it was like I could feel your soul. Both of our souls.”

Rimmer snorted.

“Holograms don’t have souls,” he stated matter-of-factly, trying not to let the assertion bother him, “But it didn’t feel bad, per se, which is infinitely surprisingly considering that it was _you,”_

“Are you up for it then?”

“May as well get it over with, I suppose,”

Lister looked at him shrewdly and Rimmer quickly looked away. He wasn’t about to let Lister see how nervously eager he was about all of this.

 “Fancy doing it on the bed?”

Rimmer froze, eyes snapping back to Lister’s face and his lips snarling into a sneer. Disdain always worked better than honesty in circumstances like this.

“If that was a _line_ then I will kill you so thoroughly that even the holosuite won’t be able to bring you back,”

“Relax guy,” Lister rolled his eyes as he got up from the chair, “I don’t have any smeggy designs on your purity. Just figured it would be comfier.”

“Fine,” he replied stiffly, too nervous by now to think of a witty comeback. Slowly he followed Lister, frowning at him as he bounced down onto the edge of Rimmer’s bunk and patted the spot next to him.

Pressing his uniform underneath himself with a show of aloof fastidiousness, he settled himself at the head of the bed, careful to keep at least a foot of difference between them both. He was enormously grateful to Holly for laying down a holographic mattress – sitting on furniture was tiresome at the best of times, and downright impossible at the worst, but his bed was an exception. It made a huge difference when he remembered the nightmare of trying to sleep that first night and repeatedly waking to find his body sinking slowly through the bedframe.

He was thankful for it, but the holo-mattress wasn’t exactly comfy; nothing could be described as ‘comfy’ when you were a hologram. It could either be touched or it could not be touched, with very few aspects of feeling in-between.

And yet.

And yet Lister’s touch had added so many new sensations to his touch repertoire that it was like seeing the world in a whole different spectrum of colour. It was comfort and excitement, a halfway house between something and nothing, and somehow encompassing so much more than the sum of both.

Lister raised his hand, looking at Rimmer in indecision for a moment before shrugging and letting it drift slowly into the centre Rimmer’s thigh.

Rimmer knew something of what to expect, but still couldn’t deny himself the small sigh of pleasure that came from that hand. He tried to disguise it as a normal breath, but was certain that Lister had seen straight through him. Evidently, he was exactly as transparent as he felt.

Lister’s eyes were wide and nearly innocent, peering at Rimmer’s face as the hologram tried not to let an artificial blush claw its way up his neck and onto his cheeks. He was failing rather miserably. The instinct to breathe more heavily had steadily overcome the unassailable fact that he didn’t need to breathe and it had not gone beyond Lister’s notice.

“Try touching me” Lister commanded softly, remaining in Rimmer’s thigh as he shuffled closer, hand sliding further through Rimmer and making him shiver. For a moment, Rimmer wasn’t sure whether he could move; he felt entirely fixed in place by the sensation that was so different to his bland reality as a hologram. Motivated for a moment by the desire to chase more of this feeling, he tentatively leant forward and placed his palm in Lister’s thigh.

He could have been hiding under a control booth right now, denying everything and comfortable in the familiarity of cowardice. If only he’d run when he should have done.

“Oh. _Oh,”_ Lister stared at him in shock.

“Mm,” Rimmer replied, noticing how suddenly close they were, how he could see every lash, each dilation of Lister’s pupils. How he could see the shimmer of saliva on his lips, could nearly smell the tang of lager and cigarettes.

They sat there for several moments, breathing heavily and trying not to look in each other’s eyes, anywhere but there, staring at their hands, at their thighs, trying to adjust to the astounding interconnectedness. 

“Did you want to try a hug?” Lister asked cautiously. Rimmer thought that Lister probably knew as well as he did how much they both wanted more of the feeling, that feeling of being part of something more than yourself, of being completely entwined with someone, even if it was someone you usually couldn’t bear to be around. 

Lister darted a look at Rimmer’s face, then withdrew his hand and repositioned himself cautiously, as if Rimmer were a dangerous animal at the zoo, or a vicious swan that was in the process of interrupting a civilised picnic. Rimmer nearly laughed at that, knowing full well there was nothing that he could ever physically do to the man. But his laughter caught in his throat, morphing into a small whimper as they were suddenly entwined from their heads down to their torsos. Lister groaned then, and Rimmer hadn’t spent several sleepless nights listening to the man above him ‘debugging the hard drive’ while watching _Dominatrix in the Matrix_ not to know what that groan meant.

He thought about pulling away, he really did. He thought desperately about it, about anything except how good this was making him feel, about how much he needed this.

“This is perfect” Lister whispered, somewhere inside his head, and he knew then that - whatever this was - he wouldn’t be able to stop it. He didn’t want to.

“Lie down?” someone asked, the words reverberating through the both of them in such a way that they couldn’t be sure who had said them. They were complied with nevertheless, and as their bodies overlapped, Rimmer felt himself jolt alarmingly and unexpectedly close to orgasm. Lister sounded in a similar state, if his panting was anything to go by. It was as if their joint feelings had become one, as if they felt what the other felt. They occupied the same space and time in the same universe. They were a single event horizon, a unified point of no return.

Lister’s arm twitched and Rimmer immediately knew why. They both felt it. Aching. Desperate. _Needy._ Longing to touch himself, just as Rimmer was. How long had it been since either of them had had a chance like this? A _feeling_ like this? And who knew when it would come again.

Silently, they agreed to never speak of it. Within the confines of their shared brain molecules, this could be allowed. It wasn’t as if they were sleeping with each other, they were just taking advantage of a fortuitous situation. It was basically just fancy masturbation. A euphemised wank.

They filled in the gaps for each other, justifying their motivations with endless strings of excuses as their hands crept under their trousers. Coherent thoughts flying out the window with nothing as much as an au-revoir when they both took themselves in hand, whispering words of encouragement to each other, of praise and desire and everything that was no longer hidden.

Words like ‘yes, so good, please, more’ filtered through Rimmer’s consciousness and he screwed his eyes shut, rocking with the intensity of it all, with the pure feeling of it all. He hadn’t _felt_ so intensely since he was alive.

Maybe not even then.

Lister’s voice and inner thoughts were encouraging him softly, coaxing him delicately towards the orgasm that was already so close that his legs twitched with it.

He murmured his own words of encouragement back, wondering whether they were salient and rapidly not caring if they were as he looked up and suddenly _saw_ the world as he remembered it, colours screaming at him, finally freed from the muted restriction that being a hologram imposed on them. Sounds were suddenly clearer and brighter and he could feel Lister’s hand, _his_ own hand, in such electric detail, move over Lister’s cock, his cock.

It was all too much. Too, incredibly, beautifully, much.

The discordant throb of their twin yells echoed hauntingly in their minds, the unreality of the situation seeping through them as they arched and bucked through each other, twisting beautifully, yet longing to hold something, to be held. The closeness was near perfection, but it was strange and foreign and alien. Neither of them understood it. It was better than so much that they had experienced, but breathtakingly alarming because of it.

They hastily rolled away from each other, panting as their hearts staccatoed, pulsing together for a moment more before falling into their own rhythm again. Rimmer became dimly aware that the world was fading in intensity around him, until it had dulled into the leaden grey-tinged reality that he had become used to. Lister becoming dimly aware that his mouth was lolling open and he was rubbing his face with a hand that didn’t seem quite like his own yet.

Rimmer’s brain roared back to speed. Anxieties quickly crowded in to fill the spaces where Lister’s brain had been sitting only recently. Three million year old gas bills. Parental disapproval. Sex. Sex with Lister. No, not sex. They’d agreed on that. It had been more than sex, much more, but it meant so much less. Lister’s face, his body… The way Lister had sounded, the way he’d _felt_ -

 Smeg.

“Smeg,” breathed Lister, glancing over at Rimmer whose expression was drifting from one emotion to the next.

“Mm,” Rimmer agreed, somehow finding the energy to slowly sit up and survey the damage. He stared at Lister for longer than usual, before hurriedly looking away and frowning down at the mess that Lister had left on his bedsheets.

He raised an eyebrow and pointed at the potential-stains that someone would have to deal with.

“Sorry man,” Lister still appeared to be trying to get his brain to work at full capacity. Rimmer couldn’t exactly blame him. “I’ll er,” he cast around for something vaguely useful, before grabbing one of his shirts off the floor and wiping the mess off the bedsheets as best he could. “Didn’t exactly expect that to happen. Would have done it in mine if I’d known.”

Rimmer snorted and collapsed back down on to the bed. He didn’t have the willpower to pursue the argument further. At least, not right now.

“How was that?” Lister interrupted Rimmer’s brief reverie, balling up the shirt and throwing it across the room as he propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at Rimmer.

“It was…” Rimmer closed his eyes, struggling to find the words and mortally afraid that he’d make a fool of himself. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make himself vulnerable like this. He opened one eye, deferring the question as he shot it back at the scouser, “How was it for you?”

“Smegging incredible,” Lister said after a pause, voice quiet as he looked down, his cheeks flushed, baby hairs pranging out from his head like a fuzzy halo. He attempted a small laugh to try and diffuse the tension “That was the most interesting… wank I’ve ever had in my life.”

“It wasn’t half bad,” Rimmer agreed, reasoning that this was a safe response as he looked away and heaved himself onto his side, expression reconnecting with Lister’s as he cheekily added; “Nearly all good, in fact.”

“Nearly all? _Nearly_ all?” Lister sounded vaguely insulted.

“There’s always room for improvement,” Rimmer had absolutely no clue what he was saying or how anything could possibly have been better than that, but if there was even the vaguest chance that appealing to Lister’s competitive nature could give this the opportunity to happen again, then he wasn’t about to pass that up. He thought he’d sort of reached the limits of ‘fun things to do when you’re dead’ but this definitely came in at the unacknowledged number one top spot.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Lister said, his face carefully schooled and giving nothing away as Rimmer looked at him for a moment, the air thick and syrupy with unspoken tension.

“I need to work on inventory,” Rimmer finally said, looking down at his hands, up at Lister and then out at the door. “Would you mind-” he gestured for Lister to get out of the bed, being careful not to brush atoms with him as he did so.

“Sure, right, fine-” Lister hastily bundled himself up, his jittery movements nearly covering the pale joy that lit his face, and clearly glad for the interruption and the attempted return to normalcy. Because really, nothing had happened, had it?

Nothing at all. 

\----

And ‘nothing at all’ was precisely how much Rimmer expected to come of the situation, and how much he would think about it from now on.

“87 tins of bioluminescent lentils,” he murmured to himself, placing a petulant tick on his mental clipboard as he stood and walked away from his memories.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos, comments and Shakespearean-style sonnets are always welcomed and make me happier than Rimmer with a completed inventory list.


End file.
